Computer networking has become an integral part of conducting business in today's world. It may be vital that a computer network operate efficiently so as to truly harness its benefits. Typically, a large computer network includes a number of network links from a plurality of network service providers (NSPs). A link load balancer is a network appliance that distributes inbound and outbound network traffic to and from multiple NSP links in the computer network. Thus, the link load balancer may help in providing failover and bandwidth management for a plurality of connections in a wide area network (WAN) to assure continuous operation of enterprise applications and cloud services in the event that one or more NSP links become unavailable or slow to respond.
As will be appreciated, there are many existing techniques in which the inbound and outbound network traffic to and from the computer network to the NSP may be routed so as to maximize usage of all the NSP links. For example, the link load balancer may employ a number of traffic management methods to ensure the seamless performance of multiple NSP links to their maximum benefit. In most of the scenarios, the network administrator may set policies for the link load balancer so that when it receives a request, it takes into account factors, such as, client and end-user round-trip times and the availability of bandwidth for each NSP link, before completing the request. In another scenario, the link load balancer may employ threshold based pre-defined method to achieve load balancing. However, many a times, such techniques fail to predict the upcoming load in the NSP, thereby resulting into unequal distribution of load and less efficient link load balancer.
In yet another scenario, a proximity detection may be employed for performing link load balancing. The technique detects proximity of physical links by sending probe packets from all the physical links after receiving the packets, and then performs load balancing based on detected proximity. However, this technique is not intelligent enough to analyze the rates of the speed, incoming and outgoing packet losses, high traffic on one of the routes, and so forth. Thus, many NSP links may be unutilized under this technique.